Using Office 365 Web Interface for Contact Sharing

In a recent deployment of Office 365 that I did for a customer, they were particularly interested in the ability to share contacts.


No problem, with an Exchange back-end you are able to share Calendars, Contacts and even whole mailboxes. The real problem in getting it done is the web-interface.

• User1 has just been upgraded to Outlook 2010, he right-clicks his contacts, selects properties and then on the permissions tab selects the user and then the desired permissions.
• User2 is a subcontractor and brings his own Macbook into work.  He has to buy his own copy of Outlook 2011 but this only comes bundled with Office 2011 so he chooses not to do it.  Outlook Web Access (owa) should be sufficient for his needs anyway.... shouldn't it?

It turns out that in Office 365 you can very simply view a shared calendar, or you can open another user's mailbox, what you can't do is open anything else very easily, but there is a work-around.  Thanks to Amit Tank for this tip which pointed me in the right direction: http://exchangeshare.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/how-to-open-shared-calendar-in-owa/

So the work-around for displaying shared contacts using owa is to enter the following address into a browser:

https://<server name>/owa/<SMTP address>/?cmd=contents&module=contacts

So you replace <server name> with the Office365 server which can be found in a few ways, I found it by Ctrl-Clicking on the Outlook system-tray icon for the machine running Outlook, and then selecting "Connection Status".  This brings up a box showing the server address.

You also replace the <SMTP address> with the email address of the user whose contacts you are trying to view.